tail_f_implementation

🔄 Implement tail -f with seek and readpartial

Reproduce the Unix tail -f functionality in Ruby by seeking to the file’s end and periodically reading new data with readpartial. This approach works cross-platform without external dependencies.

File.open('app.log', 'r') do |f|
  f.seek(0, IO::SEEK_END)
  loop do
    begin
      print f.readpartial(4096)
    rescue EOFError
      sleep 0.5
      retry
    end
  end
end

You can extend this to yield lines via an Enumerator or integrate with event-driven frameworks.